IRBIL, Iraq -- The leader of Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region said Tuesday that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was confronting an enormous challenge in seeking a multisectarian Iraqi government, declaring that a rapid Sunni insurgent advance has already created "a new reality and a new Iraq."
The United Nations, meanwhile, said more than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Iraq so far this month, the highest death toll since the U.S. military withdrew from the country in December 2011.
Kerry's trip to the Kurdish regional capital, Irbil, was his first as secretary of state. He met with Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, after meetings in Baghdad on Monday with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and with Shiite and Sunni politicians.
After Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took over Mosul and began to move south, Kurdish security forces known as peshmerga responded by moving into Kirkuk, a city located in an oil-rich region that has long been divided between Arabs and Kurds.
The Kurds' expansion has put them in a position to demand more autonomy in political talks over Iraq's future. But it also has the potential to complicate the effort to cobble together a new Iraqi government, particularly one that does not include al-Maliki, who has long been accused of autocratic tendencies by Iraqi politicians.
Al-Maliki has been focused on the security situation in the country, spending hours each day in the main military command center, officials close to his inner circle said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Despite the attention, Iraq's mainly Shiite security forces have failed to wage any successful counteroffensives against the insurgents.
He instead is deploying the military's best-trained and equipped troops to defend Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.
A weeklong fight for control of Iraq's largest oil refinery continued Tuesday with helicopter gunships attacking what appeared to be formations of Sunni militants preparing for another assault on the facility in Beiji, a top military official said.
Chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi has denied reports that the facility has fallen to the rebels.
Air forces also reportedly bombed the town of Qaim near the Syrian border Tuesday, days after it was seized by Islamic extremists in Anbar province, west of Baghdad. Provincial government spokesman Dhari al-Rishawi said 17 civilians were killed.
Kerry traveled to Irbil a day after pushing for al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials in Baghdad to adopt new policies that would give more authority to Iraq's minority Sunnis and Kurds.
He said after the Baghdad meetings that all the leaders agreed to start the process of seating a new parliament by next Tuesday, which will advance a constitutionally required timetable for naming a president, prime minister and a new Cabinet. Al-Maliki's political bloc won the most seats in parliamentary elections in April but must assemble a majority coalition in the legislature to secure a third term for the Shiite leader.
Kerry has repeatedly said that it's up to Iraqis -- not the U.S. or other nations -- to select their leaders. But he also has noted bitterness and growing impatience among all of Iraq's major sects and ethnic groups with al-Maliki's government.
Barzani's support will be crucial for resolving the political impasse because Kurds represent about 20 percent of Iraq's population and usually vote as a unified bloc.
He told Kerry that Kurds are seeking "a solution for the crisis that we have witnessed." But, he said, "we are facing a new reality and a new Iraq."
Kerry said at the start of his hour-long meeting with Barzani that the Kurdish security forces have been "really critical" in helping restrain the insurgents.
"This is a very critical time for Iraq, and the government formation challenge is the central challenge that we face," Kerry said. He said Iraqi leaders must "produce the broad-based, inclusive government that all the Iraqis I have talked to are demanding."
Sharing power
The U.S. believes that a new power-sharing agreement in Baghdad would soothe anger directed at the majority Shiite government, a rage that is thought to have fueled the ongoing insurgency.
Iraq's population is about 60 percent Shiite Muslim, whose leaders rose to power with U.S. help after the 2003 fall of former President Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated regime.
Two senior State Department officials who attended the meeting said Kerry preemptively raised the issue of the Kurdish region's "self-determination" -- its years-long desire to create an independent state -- and told Barzani that Iraq will remain stronger if it is united. They spoke on condition of anonymity in exchange for releasing the details of the private meeting.
Iraqi Kurds had no love for Saddam, and they were allowed to carve out a semi-autonomous region in Iraq's north to protect themselves from his policies. But Barzani for years has feuded with al-Maliki, most recently over the Kurdish regional government's decision to export oil through Turkey without giving Baghdad its required share of the revenue.
The Kurdish region is home to several vast oil fields and has enjoyed security and economic stability unmatched across the rest of the Iraq.
Control of Kirkuk and Kurdish pockets elsewhere in northern Iraq has been at the heart of tension between the Kurdish region and the Baghdad government. Al-Maliki's supporters frequently suggest that the Kurds did nothing as the Sunni militants swept through most areas in the north because they stood to gain from chaos in the region. The Kurds have insisted they moved to Kirkuk and other areas to fill a security vacuum.
Al-Maliki has for months requested U.S. military help to quell the insurgency, and President Barack Obama's administration has said it must respond to the insurgent threat before it puts the West at risk of attack.
Obama is reluctant to send American military might back to the war zone, though he has authorized as many as 300 U.S. special forces troops to be sent to Iraq as advisers.
A small contingent of U.S. forces has begun operating in Iraq to gather intelligence and establish an operations center in Baghdad, the Defense Department said Tuesday.
Forty troops already stationed at the U.S. Embassy have begun the new assessment mission, and 90 more from the Middle East have arrived in Baghdad, bringing to 130 the number of personnel involved, Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday.
Kirby said the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant now controls most of a "central swath" of Iraq, is "solidifying gains" and poses "a legitimate threat to Baghdad."
The militants "are killing and maiming, but they're also grabbing ground," Kirby said. "They are behaving like an organized force."
Death toll rising
The U.N. findings released Tuesday were the first concrete sign of the toll the chaos is taking on civilians and Iraqi security forces.
The U.N. team reported at least 1,075 people killed, including 757 civilians in the Ninevah, Diyala and Salahuddin provinces in northern and central Iraq, from June 5 through Sunday.
The latest casualty figures exceed even last year's peak. The U.N. reported that last July at least 1,057 Iraqis were killed and another 2,326 were wounded by terrorism and violence. The dead that month included 724 civilians, 204 civilian police and 129 Iraqi security force members.
U.N. human-rights office spokesman Rupert Colville cautioned Tuesday that the latest figure "should be viewed very much as a minimum," and said it included "summary executions" and extra-judicial killings of civilians, police and soldiers who had signaled that they were no longer combatants.
As the fighting continued Tuesday, at least one military aircraft attacked Qaim, an insurgent-controlled town near the border with Syria, local officials and residents said.
"I was sleeping when a big explosion shook our house," said Mohammad al-Ani, a resident reached by telephone.
"I went directly to the hospital to check if any of my relatives or friends had been killed or wounded, but the militants prevented all the people from getting into the hospital."
Officials in Qaim said the strikes had been carried out by the Syrian Air Force, though their account could not be immediately confirmed and a representative of al-Maliki's office disputed the claim.
Dr. Kareem Bardan, a physician who treated the wounded at Qaim hospital, said initial reports that many women and children had been killed were untrue but that he knew of one woman and three children younger than 15 who were among the dead.
In other violence Tuesday, assailants killed Munir al-Qafili, the head of the Kirkuk City Council and a politically active member of the Turkmen minority group, Police Chief Torhan Abdul-Rahim said.
It was the first such attack since Kurdish forces seized control of the city.
West of Baghdad, authorities found the bodies of 12 policemen killed as militants seized the Anbar town of Rutba over the weekend. Militants also stole about $5 million from the town's state-run bank, the authorities said, declining to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation by the militants.
The bodies of three men who were shot in the head and chest and had their hands and legs bound also were found on the streets of three Shiite neighborhoods in and around Baghdad, according to police and hospital officials.
Information for this article was contributed by Lara Jakes, Hamza Hendawi, Sinan Salaheddin, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Sameer N. Yacoub and John Heilprin of The Associated Press; by Michael R. Gordon, C. J. Chivers, Suadad al-Salhy and Karam Shoumali of The New York Times; and by David Lerman of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/25/2014